Grief Recovery: What 'Recovery' Will and Will Not Mean

By Therese Rando, Ph.D.

Knowing now what is necessary
to resolve grief, and being armed with specific suggestions on how
to achieve its resolution, you may be wondering precisely what
"recovery" will and will not mean to you in your mourning. This
chapter looks at the goal of recovery and what it entails. It ends
by looking at the signs indicating whether you are reaching this
goal.

You will note that the word "recovery" has been placed in quotation
marks. Like resolution, the term is a relative one. Recovery does
not mean a once-and-all type of closure. It means to regain your
abilities to function at your previous levels, and to have
successfully resolved and integrated your loss as discussed in
chapter 34. In some ways, however, you technically can never
recover totally, because you will never be exactly the way you were
before. The loss of your loved one will change you in numerous
ways. What can be recovered, however, are your attributes and your
capabilities, despite the fact that other aspects of you
necessarily are different. You now have a slightly different self,
arising from the changes in you and your world as a consequence of
your loved one's death. For the rest of this chapter, recovery will
not be enclosed with quotation marks.

The Goal of Recovery

The goal of your recovery should be to learn to live with your loss
and to adjust to your new life accordingly. The adjustments must
take place in yourself (through your new identity), in your
relationship with the deceased (through the development of a new
relationship with her), and in the new world (readjusting to it
without the deceased and, at the appropriate time, reinvesting
emotional energy in new people, objects, goals, ideals and other
pursuits). This does not mean that you would have chosen your loss
or that you ever wanted it. It merely means that you no longer have
to fight it. You "accept" it in the sense of learning to live with
it as an inescapable fact of your life.

Recovery means that you can integrate the past with the new present
that exists. You will never forget, but you will not always be
acutely bereaved. Recovery from your loss will leave a psychic
scar, like a scar that remains after a physical operation. This
does not necessarily interfere with your present functioning, but
there are certain days and particular conditions when the scar will
ache or throb. It will remind you of what you have been through and
you will have to do something to tolerate the pain until it
passes.

What Recovery Will Mean

Grief will bring many changes to you. You can expect to have a
changed identity and redefined roles, relationships, and skills.
Their changes can be either positive or negative. As someone who
has loved and lost, you either can be the richer for it or be
diminished because of the parts of yourself that are irretrievably
gone. Again, like the physical scars, our psychic scars can give us
character or be sources of vulnerability. It will be up to you to
determine your response to your scar. This means that you will need
to choose how to respond to the rest of your life after you have
worked through your grief.

While you may have had no control or choice over your loved one's
dying, you do have a choice over how you will let the loss affect
you. I am not speaking now about the acute period of grief in which
you will be subject to many varying psychological, social, and
physical effects in all realms of your life. I am speaking here
about what type of perspective or attitude you will take toward the
rest of your life as your mourning brings you to a recovered state.
For example, will you make the most out of the rest of your life,
or will you be bitter? Will you incorporate your loss and have it
be a catalyst for growth, or will you stay stuck and mired in it,
never to take risks again? Will the death of your loved one cause
you to make sure you will never have any unfinished business with
others you care about, or will it give you the sense that "the
world owes me"?

Countless bereaved individuals demonstrate the positive benefits
that can come from a major loss. This does not mean that you would
have chosen to have lost your loved one, but that you have chosen
to recover from it and capitalize on whatever good can come from
this bad. This is not a sappy or unrealistic, overly positive view
that denies the pain of grief and the price of the loss of your
loved one. Rather, it recognizes that even in undergoing the pain
of separation through death you can decide that it will have some
positive meaning for the remainder of your life.

The positive responses can be many and varied. Those who have loved
and lost have reported that their eyes have been opened to new
experiences and priorities that were formerly overlooked. For
instance, they were made more aware of those loved ones they still
had. Many have found a commitment to living life more fully and
meaningfully because of the death. The increased awareness of
life's preciousness, fragility, and brevity has become a positive,
life-enhancing force, pushing them to avoid putting off until
tomorrow the things they can say and do today. They live their
lives in such a way as to have the smallest amount of unfinished
business possible with their loved ones.

Other mourners have reordered their priorities toward increased
family commitment and unity. They no longer take for granted those
they love. Bereaved individuals have become more compassionate and
caring towards others, closer in relationships, and more sensitive.
The pain of their loss has led many of them to fuller expression of
feeling and more open discussion of sensitive emotional issues.
Many have experienced greater personal growth and increased
religiousness and spirituality. Losing a loved one has heightened
perceptions and raised slates of consciousness in many grievers.
Like dying patients, many now can open themselves up without fear
of vulnerability, since they have faced the ultimate loss of death.
They truly can "take time to smell the roses." Such people often
report increased productivity in their lives, and many have used
their loss experience creatively, transforming their pain through
art, literature, music, writing, and other creative efforts.

In their determination that some good should come from their loss,
others have channeled their pain and rage into meaningful endeavors
assisting both themselves and society. Bereavement support groups
have been established to assist others, with some of them having a
political focus such as Parents of Murdered Children, in which
political changes are urged to ensure that no others suffer the
same bereavement.

Many bereaved persons have discovered and developed new aspects of
their identity that were previously unknown. They have realized new
interests, found new relationships, or started living in ways that
in some cases are more satisfactory and fulfilling than before.
This does not mean that they were not grieved by the loss of their
loved one. It only means that they responded to that loss, after
the period of grief and mourning, in ways that made them become
enriched by the pain. Successfully enduring the pain and suffering
of grief and mourning have allowed these people to have a deeper
sense of self-worth and to become stronger persons. The strength
gained in facing and surviving the adversity has made them better,
more concerned, and more compassionate people.

Many become capable of more intimacy than ever before. Many of them
recognize that they have been through the worst, and now that they
have survived, they want to get on with the business of living in
as healthy a fashion as possible, focusing on their priorities and
not suffering fools gladly. Many now no longer tolerate those
people and things they put up with in the past. They are
appropriately more assertive, and set more limits.

On the other hand, you may not want to use your loss constructively
to have a better life. All of the aforementioned possible responses
could be flipped and the reverse could be the outcome. You may
become hardened, cold, closed, and unwilling to reach out for
yourself or to others. This is your prerogative; it is your choice.
Just recognize that you are making it and take responsibility for
it. Do not blame it on the death. And do not think that if you do
do something constructive with your loss and what you have learned
from it, that this means you are unmoved by the death or that you
are betraying your loved one.

What Recovery Will Not Mean

There are certain things that recovery does not mean. It does not
mean that you forget, either your loved one or the old world. It
does nor mean that you have no relationship at all with your
deceased loved one. And it does not mean you are always happy,
never to have any more pain. Just as you can decide what recovery
will mean, you can decide what it won't mean. Recovery will not
mean that you are not touched by certain reminders, such as that
certain song, that particular smell, or that special location. It
will not mean that you do not experience the bittersweet
combination of feelings that holidays can bring, as you rejoice
with those who are still present and mourn for those no longer
here. It will not mean that in certain events in your life you do
not painfully wish for your loved one to be alive to be present
with you, share in your joy, or be proud of you.

Recovery will not mean that you don't mourn any longer; it means
that you learn to live with the mourning in ways that do not
interfere with your ongoing healthy functioning in the new life
without your loved one. For those who have lost someone they loved
a great deal, the mourning will never cease entirely. This is
described below in a passage written by psychiatrist Gerald Caplan
discussing widows. It can be applied equally to other bereaved
people.

In our earlier formulations we had thought that a [bereaved
person] "recovers" at the end of the four to six weeks of her
bereavement crises on condition that she manage to accomplish her
"grief work" adequately. We believed that thereafter she would be
psychologically competent to carry on with the tasks of ordinary
living, subject only to the practical readjustment demanded by her
new social roles. We now realize that most [bereaved persons]
continue the psychological work of mourning for their loved ones
for the rest of their lives. During the turmoil and struggles of
the first one to three years, most [bereaved persons] generally
learn how to circumscribe and segregate this mourning within their
mental economy and how to continue living despite its burden. After
this time they are no longer actively mourning, but their loss
remains a part of them and now and again they are caught up in a
resurgence of feelings of grief. This happens with decreasing
frequency as time goes on, but never ceases entirely. (Caplan 1974,
viii)

Most bereaved individuals eventually come to terms with their grief
and carry on with their lives in healthy and productive fashions.
However, total resolution of mourning, in the sense of completely
and permanently finishing it and never being touched again by some
clement of the loss, usually never truly occurs.

Taken from Therese A. Rando, How To Go on Living When Someone
You Love Dies. New York: Bantam Books, 1991, pp 279-283.

Dr. Therese Rando, author of
How To Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies, is a
psychologist in Warwick, Rhode Island, where she is the Clinical
Director of The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss.
Having published 70 works pertaining to the clinical aspects of
dying, death, loss, and trauma, Dr. Rando is a recognized expert in
the field and has appeared on numerous television programs,
including “Dateline,” CBS “This Morning,” “Today Show,” “Good
Morning, America,” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”